The Pacific Solution's brutal fact: we need it

We risk social disruption if we take more than a tiny fraction of asylum seekers.

By Jonathan Holmes

UpdatedMay 3, 2016 — 2.32pmfirst published at 12.00am

I have never written before about Australia's "Pacific Solution". Most people I know deplore it, on moral grounds. Innumerable commentators – most notably in these pages, the redoubtable Waleed Aly – have exposed the myths and secrets and lies we allow to shield us from the brutal reality of Nauru and Manus Island; what Aly calls "factories of mental illness".

When you've got the likes of Aly on the case, you don't need Jonathan Holmes. And besides, I have a problem. Though I agree with almost everything he and other refugee advocates have to say about the practical evils and the moral bankruptcy of "off-shore processing", I don't believe one should pontificate about a policy unless one has some vaguely practical alternative to propose.

Perhaps that's not surprising. After all, a succession of Australian governments, backed by the policy brainpower of one of the world's finest public services, has been gnawing fruitlessly on this bone for nigh on 25 years. The Pacific solution was John Howard's desperate resort in the wake of the Tampa incident. Kevin Rudd shared the moral abhorrence of those who opposed it, but reality defeated him. The boats started landing again. A trickle soon turned into a flood. The East Timor solution, the Malaysian solution, came and went. It was the Pacific Solution that stopped the boats the second time, as it had the first.

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Protesters doing their thing.Credit:Paul Jeffers

But why did we need to stop the boats?

I don't believe for a second that the politicians' primary motive is to save lives at sea. As Aly and many others have pointed out, that's a Johnny-come-lately justification – it arrived long after John Howard had left the political stage.

During the so-called "Tampa" election in 2001, I was the executive producer of the ABC's 7.30 Report. Every time we aired an item that was in any way sympathetic to boat people, we would get a flood of reaction from viewers: outraged, furious, bitter. It gave me some inkling of the tide that was washing into MPs' electoral offices.

And nowhere more than in western Sydney and western Melbourne, the heartlands of Australia's post-war immigrant population, where to have parents who were native English speakers made you the exception, not the rule.

Opposition to boat people is often dismissed by refugee advocates as "racist". That's a fundamental misunderstanding.Credit:Bryan Charlton

These were people who had stood in the "queue" that others called fictional, who had waited years for the family reunion scheme to bring their wives and kids and parents to Australia; who had relatives and friends hoping desperately to join them; who knew that every boat person allowed to stay was one fewer of their own people who'd be admitted through the off-shore humanitarian visa intake.

They are also the parts of Australia where most people know someone who arrived by boat. They know about the networks of agents set up by people-smugglers, have seen the phone calls to families in Malaysia and Indonesia.

In this 1999 photo, migrants arrive in East Timor to replenish supplies, their destination believed to be Australia.

In three Four Corners programs (links here, here and here) that made far less impact than they deserved, Sarah Ferguson revealed beyond doubt that the criminal people-smuggler networks are not just a fantasy dreamt up by immigration ministers. They exist. And a lot of Australians know it. They don't see why people who can pay criminals should be able to buy a chance at a life they themselves had to get by legal means.

I still see the opposition to boat people dismissed by refugee advocates as "racist". That's a fundamental misunderstanding. Australia is rightly proud of its immigration program. It has created one of the most diverse and successful multi-ethnic nations in the world. The reason the boat people had to be stopped was that – justifiably or otherwise – they were undermining Australians' belief in a fair and orderly immigration program.

Refugees arrive at Christmas Island in November 1999.

But, say many of the current policy's opponents, there are other solutions. In this four-year-old blog on the ABC's Religion and Ethics site, Aly argues that it's just a matter of taking more refugees from Indonesia. If people could get here legitimately, they wouldn't risk the boats. The Guardian's Richard Ackland put much the same proposition just last week.

Both blithely ignore that the people in Indonesia and Malaysia who want to come to Australia are not Indonesians or Malaysians. Overwhelmingly, they are Hazaras from Afghanistan, and Iranians; if the way to Australia were open, they would now be Syrians too. They've already travelled a long way – helped by people smugglers – to get to Indonesia, and there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, more where they came from.

Taking a large proportion of would-be Australian migrants from Indonesia would only induce more to follow; very soon there would be far more than any orderly migration program could accommodate. The Indonesians and Malaysians would not thank us for that. That's why we source so much of our refugee intake from camps close to where they've fled from: Somalis and Sudanese from Kenya, Afghans from Pakistan, and so on.

As Europe is discovering, there is an almost limitless demand, through the Middle East, and central Asia, and Africa, for a better, safer life. Whether these people are "genuine refugees" or "economic migrants" may matter to the lawyers, but is immaterial in policy terms.

The brutal fact is that we cannot take them all. We cannot, without risking social disruption, take more than a tiny fraction of them. And as John Howard famously said, it should be our government that decides who comes to this country, not a free-for-all scramble for a place on a leaky boat.

For the poor souls who are its victims, the "Pacific Solution" has provided a living hell. I doubt their agony can be justified philosophically. I don't believe we should be sheltered from it by censorship. I hope, somehow, that it can soon be ended.

But I don't know what the alternative policy should have been in the past, or could be in the future.

Jonathan Holmes is a Fairfaxcolumnist and a former presenter of the ABC's Media Watch program.